Adam Curtis, the documentary-maker behind Power of Nightmares, has said he may draw inspiration from hit HBO series The Wire for his next major TV project.

In a wide-ranging interview at the Sheffield Doc/Fest Curtis also attacked Twitter as a "self aggrandising, smug pressure group" which promoted a "narrow non-social view of the world".

He said the site has been used by journalists reporting the Arab spring to simplify the complexities of the uprisings to narrow stories of individuals writing on the site.

"Twitter is fun and it feeds the rat of the self but it is almost as if you miss large chunks of the world [through it]," he said.

Speaking about ideas for his next project Curtis, whose three-part series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace recently aired to acclaim on BBC2, said he was thinking of examining the links between "managerialism and criminality".

"I am thinking about doing a series on how managerialism and criminality mirror each other," he said. "In a series like [BBC2 drama] The Shadow Line or The Wire we see they mirror each other and I'm thinking of doing something like that."

In The Wire, which aired on FX channel in the UK, the brutal activities of the Baltimore drug cartels are portrayed alongside the often corrupt and bureaucratic public institutions.

The character Stringer Bell, played by British actor Idris Elba, is shown studying a business course at college while the machinations of institutions such as Baltimore's school system, city hall and the world of newspapers are also explored.

Curtis is usually given enormous licence and time to make his films and his next project has not yet been green lit. But his disclosure provides the first indication of what his next project might be.

He told the packed audience at the city's Lyceum theatre that his principal guide to picking a project is a "really good story".

Curtis began making films in the early 1980s. His most famous include The Century of the Self in 2002 which examined how Freud's theories of the unconscious shaped the development of PR and advertising.

His 2004 series The Power of Nightmares was a polemic on the war on terror and the use of fear by western governments to manipulate the population.

In All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace he examined, among other things, the theories of the later American thinker Ayn Rand and the Silicon Valley pioneers and argued machines make us believe in a stable world.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

• To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook.